Dr. Rand Bohrer
Senior Research Associate
College of Architecture, Georgia Tech
Abstract. Architects deal with the relationship of people to their environment. What architects do is structure this relationship. People live in an increasingly electronic environment. Does this mean architecture becomes electronic? Do future architects develop virtual spaces and edifices -- electronic forums, electronic malls, electronic roads? Are these empty metaphors or is the architecture of the future an electronic architecture?
The Georgia Tech College of Architecture has a unique opportunity to explore these issues. Atlanta will host the XXV Olympics, and Georgia Tech will be the Olympic Village. Plans are underway to hold an exhibition organized around the theme of Designing the Ideal World City -- Architecture of the Future. The Internet will play the central role in this exhibition. The web will be both a medium of presentation and a part of the exhibition’s content.
The Olympics are, of course, the example par excellence of an international exhibition -- a show exhibiting outstanding examples from around the world, brought together for comparison, dramatically staged. Traditionally, physical architecture houses and stages the competition. Our exhibition, however, will assemble, house and present its content primarily via the Internet. The design of the exhibit will stress the potential for creating the ideal world city via electronic architecture. The exhibition will include such topics as these:
the future of expositions -- an electronic Cultural Olympiad
the electronic cathedral -- from San Marco’s mosaics to NSCA’s Mosaic
virtual public architecture -- forums, libraries, museums, theaters
the electronic city -- engineering public and private spaces
the accessible city -- the potential for electronic analogs
real virtual reality -- “sensory” versus “functional” architectural analogs
Overview. This presentation is about the relationship of architecture and the web. Is the architecture of the future an electronic architecture? -- an architecture made up of virtual communities, museums without walls, electronic forums and downtown anywhere? Over the next two years these questions will be explored by a practical experiment. In the summer of 1996 the city of Atlanta will host the Olympics, and my home institution, Georgia Tech, will be the site of the Olympic village. City- wide planning, redesign, and construction are now under way. Surrounded by all this activity, the College of Architecture plans to hold an international exhibition on Designing the Ideal World City. This exhibition, held in conjunction with the Olympics, will have aspects of a traditional exhibition, but the Internet will play a new and important part. The physical exhibition will be paralleled by a web exhibition which will bring together contributions from around the world. Moreover, one of the explicit themes of the exhibition will be the relationship of architecture and the web. The web will not only be a delivery medium; it will also be an important part of the content. What I want to do is discuss the relationship of the web and architecture, in general, the role of the web in the exhibition, in specific, and begin to explore some of the issues the exhibition will highlight.
Architecture and the Web
Parameters. Obviously, any treatment of this subject ought to mention ways that architects can use the web to present ideas and to collaborate with others. It ought to deal with the use of the web to bring together contributions from all over the world in on-line architectural exhibitions or competitions. In other words, it ought to cover the ways in which the web can be used by the architect to perform traditional architectural activities. Less obvious, but just as important, the subject of architecture and the web might also deal with what architects, with a four thousand year tradition of multimedia design practice, can contribute to the design of web environments. This can be taken two ways. First, what can architects do for the net? And second, what new opportunities does the net provide the architect? i.e., does the web provide the architect a new sort of “material” and “space” with which to work?
Enhancing Traditional Practice. First let’s look at the possibility of the web augmenting existing architectural practice. In all likelihood the web will penetrate architectural practice fairly rapidly. (Although virtually no architectural or construction firms are now on the Internet -- with the huge exception of the Corps of Engineers.) As more and more of their clients appear on-line, architectural firms will quickly begin using the Internet to advertise their talents. Many firms already have networked CAD systems and powerful rendering platforms, as well as skilled design personnel. High quality visuals, models and animations in digital format are already being produced. Accustomed to making elaborate mixed media presentations, architects should find the web congenial now that programs like Mosaic and the adoption of presentation standards have made the Internet accessible to the laity. In fact, I expect that architects, with their extensive training in visual communication and design, will quickly produce some of the most striking commercial web sites.
As architectural firms and university departments of architecture come on-line, web exhibitions and competitions will become normal. Staging international competitions has long been a staple of the architectural community. It will not be long before architects perceive the ways in which the Internet can be used to assemble together designs from around the world and to put them on display to the world. Considering the powerfully exhibitionist egos of many architects, the attraction of the Internet as a publishing medium can hardly be over estimated.
At the most basic level, architects will adapt their designs to accommodate the new working arrangements that are brought about by the expansion of the net. Always sensitive to innovations that will make their structures more marketable -- especially if low cost -- architects are likely to add “net readiness” to their armory of “smart building” features. But will architectural firms themselves actually use the web to perform work? To create a distributed studio? (Some experiments with the use of virtual reality by architects suggest that the use of the web in actual studio practice may meet resistance. Architects found V R to be fine for marketing demonstrations to clients but not particularly useful in their own design process.)
The Potential for Architectural Contributions to the Web. Clearly, the web has the potential for enhancing architectural practice. But does the inverse hold true? Does architectural theory and practice have anything to contribute to the development of the web? Listening closely to the language used to describe the web is very suggestive.
Artificial intelligence theorist David Gelerntner writes how computer scientists “talk about architecture a great deal,” having stolen the term from “its rightful owners.” He notes that “the term has been purloined for convenience, but the theft says a lot.” What says even more is a look at the metaphors used to depict web sites to their visitors. Malls, forums, shops, stores, school houses, museums, villages, towns, downtowns, shopping centers, and theaters line the highways of the Internet. Hundreds of sites greet us with the announcement “Pardon our dust. This site is under construction.” The sheer profusion of building metaphors -- far more prevalent than book metaphors -- says a lot. The metaphor “computer architecture” or “software architecture” is a “loose” metaphor. A well designed program and a well designed building may both display a “strong, vibrant feedback loop between engineering utility and aesthetics,” but they seldom share a functional similarity. However, the “buildings” on the net frequently serve exactly the same purpose as their mortar and stone analogs. The Web Louvre displays art to its visitors from around the world as does its physical counterpart. It is the fulfillment of Andre Malraux’s idea of a “museum without walls.” In other words, the metaphor is far “tighter” than the one implied by the phrase “software architecture.” In Aristotelian terms, net places and physical buildings often share efficient, formal and end causes, differing only in their material causes.
Whether one agrees with program designer Brenda Laurel on the utility of using Aristotle’s poetics to describe what programs do, it is clear that the architects of the web could probably benefit from an exposure to architectural theory and practice. One suspects that the predilection for building metaphors is, in effect, a statement that the “livability” of computer environments is of as much concern as computer science’s “interface usability.” Or, as the architectural theorist Micha Bandini pointed out, computer environments need to take into account the psychic display needs of their inhabitants, just as a room’s walls provide for the display of their occupants “comforting” pictures and memorabilia. If this sounds too “soft” or impractical for computer scientists, one might cite the advisability of consulting architects on designing for accessibility. Architects are quite professionally aware of the implications of the Americans with Disabilities Act. For example, recently the Post Office was about to let a multimillion dollar contract for 10,000 networked kiosks and software. When asked by an architectural school if accessibility had been taken into account, the program officer said that a human factors Ph.D. had reviewed the specifications. He, however, did not know if this Ph.D. had any background in disability work and was surprised to learn that multimedia posed special problems for people with sensory disabilities.
Who Will Be the Architects of the Web? Architects deal with the relationship of people to their environment. What architects do is structure this relationship. As people come to live in increasingly electronic environments architecture becomes de facto electronic. “Electronic architecture” is not an empty trope; it is a reality that is becoming increasingly manifest as the web’s potential is actualized. But it is another matter altogether as to whether architects will design the electronic edifices of the World Wide Web. In the nineteenth century railroads came to dominate the business of transporting large numbers of people between cities, but in the twentieth century railroad magnates did not evolve into airline executives. Though the function of both industries was to move people, the physical differences made this seemingly natural evolution inconceivable. Will architects learn to design with HTML? Will they build intangible electronic cities of the future on the web? Or will computer interface engineers develop a sense of flair and become the web equivalents of Portman and Pei? I don’t know which is less likely, but the challenge is real to design the architecture that structures peoples’ electronic environment.
Rationale for the Exhibition
Architecture and International Exhibitions. The foregoing delineates the relationship of architecture and the World Wide Web. Now, let’s turn to an examination of the rationale behind the planned exhibition. To begin with, there is a substantial correlation between architecture and international exhibitions. International exhibitions have been occasions for showcasing exceptional architecture: the Eiffel Tower and the Paris Exposition of 1889, the Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition of 1851, the White City of the Columbia Exposition, the Needle of the Seattle World’s Fair... But more centrally, architecture for the display and staging is essential. Anyone who has had the debatable pleasure of living in a city chosen to host the Olympics knows that the show involves as much construction as athletics. New stadiums, new housing, new parks -- nothing short of the destruction of a city in wartime provides as great an opportunity for urban renewal in a compressed span of time. Consequently, with the signs of construction all around us, with the papers full of sound and fury of debate over development plans, it is only natural as a college of architecture that we would think about taking advantage of the Olympics to provide a forum on the function and form of the city.
Newmedia Technology and the Exhibition. Exhibition architecture frequently foreshadows technological advances. The Eiffel Tower, for instance, heralded the use of structural iron and steel to build skyscrapers. Is the World Wide Web the modern equivalent of structural steel which allowed hitherto unprecedented urban concentrations of people? If it is, then showcasing it in our exhibition is historically logical. It might be worth noting in this context that synthetic architectural modeling and interactive multimedia have already played a very important role in the Atlanta Olympics. Atlanta used interactive multimedia models of what the city and the Olympic village would be like to convince the Olympic committee to choose Atlanta from among six other cities. These multimedia displays of the city were the decisive element in the surprising choice of Atlanta over Athens. As the Japanese delegate noted, “Athens showed us the past, Atlanta showed us the future.” Surrogate travel through yet to be constructed venues, a form of virtual reality, proved an effective marketing tool as well as the most notable example to date of architectural visualization. Moreover, the models, with their high degree of visualization, required the Atlanta group to firm up their plans and revealed potential problems. The result was that the Atlanta bid package was more developed, more concretely detailed than the other bids. These newmedia presentations of an idealized city of the future, in effect, are the foundation on which the exhibition will be built.
Exhibit Features and Topics
The Olympics are, of course, the example par excellence of an international exhibition -- a show exhibiting outstanding examples from around the world, brought together for comparison, dramatically staged. Traditionally, physical architecture houses and stages the competition. Our exhibition, however, will assemble, house and present its content primarily via the Internet. The design of the exhibit will stress the potential for creating the ideal world city via electronic architecture. Text commentaries, graphics, and animations on exhibit topics will be made via the web in the form of HTML documents. Multiple large screen displays will allow viewers in Atlanta to see different parts of the exhibit simultaneously. But the principal audience will be on the net. Objects from the physical exhibit will be transmitted (along with the net exhibit) to this audience.
While specific details have not been worked out, a number of promising ideas have been considered. For instance:
Besides pictures of Atlanta, model data for the city can be provided on-line for use in a on-line design competition.
Visitors to the exhibition, physical or on-line, might be asked to respond graphically to various cognitive models and spatial representations of city plans. The responses then could be abstracted to form an electronic meta or ideal representation.
Forums (i.e., Mosaic pages for listing URLs on common topics) on a variety of architectural subjects. Contributions would reside not in Atlanta but at sites around the world. Maps guiding visitors to outstanding examples of on-line examples of electronic architecture could be developed. Visitors would be able to enter the locations of their own favorite exhibitions, malls, museums, art galleries, etc.
A time machine making available historic web sites that have disappeared -- such as those for the 1994 Goodwill Games or the 1994 Illinois State Fair -- could transport visitors to the Internet of the past.
Instances could be multiplied. However, the above examples are sufficient to give some idea of what might be done.
Exhibition Themes. One of the most important aspects of the exhibition will be its thematic focus on web related topics. The exhibition will include such topics as these:
the future of expositions -- an electronic Cultural Olympiad
the electronic cathedral -- from San Marco’s mosaics to NSCA’s Mosaic
virtual public architecture -- forums, libraries, museums, theaters
the electronic city -- engineering public and private spaces
the accessible city -- the potential for electronic analogs
real virtual reality -- “sensory” versus “functional” architectural analogs
Let me take “the electronic cathedral” topic from this list as an example to illustrate what sort of speculations might be entertained. The highest form of architecture is, arguably, the temple or cathedral. Frequently, these structures aspire to be representations of the universe, to be encyclopedic compendiums of spiritual and natural knowledge. San Marco’s Cathedral in Venice, which for obvious reasons must be the mother church of web, illustrates through its mosaics the entire range of history, from Genesis to the final Judgment. It is, in fact, from associations with the Muses of history and memory that the lured mosaic is derived. [ME musycke < OFr. mosaique < OItal. mosaico < Med. Lat. musaicus < Gk. mouseios, of the Muses < Mousa, Muse.] It is possible that something of this “ associational universe” was implicit in the choice of the name of the pre-eminent web application. In any case, Mosaic certainly can be seen as building material for an electronic cathedral that contains within its structure representations of the most distant places and times. Such speculations provide a wealth of potential World Wide Web exhibit materials. Pictures of San Marco’s mosaics, floor plans of the cathedral, a web analog of a church, various mandalas, etc. -- all available via the web.
I hope that the preceding commentary has served both as an announcement for a web exhibition and an introductory treatment of the relationship of the World Wide Web and architecture.
Biosketch
Rand Bohrer works on developing multimedia knowledge acquisition and information systems. After a recent stroke, he suddenly developed an expertise in various disabilities and an interest in computer accessibility. He has designed several video games and a number of multimedia marketing applications. He holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from Yale University.
rand@ornear.gatech.edu